Student Discounts & Giveaway of the Day

This morning an interesting article came to my inbox from Amit Agarwal's Digital Inspiration. This is one of the few subscriptions that I haven't yet transferred to my RSS feed -- which is probably a good thing because I haven't been reading that lately. Amit's list of "Most Useful Websites" was the first collection I came across with inspiring tools I could use with my students.

Today Amit's post included a blurb entitled : A Student's Guide to Microsoft DreamSpark -- a software giveaway program announced by Bill Gates earlier in 2009.















Wikipedia tells me that "DreamSpark is a program set up by Microsoft to provide students with software design and development tools" including Visual Studio, Expression Studio as well as studios for Robotics and Game development and assorted servers. Apparently Dreamspark has been available to college students for some time, but the offer was expanded by Gates to include verified high school students and is nearly world wide. Microsoft is also giving away Student Passes for 12 -22 hours of free Microsoft IT Academy online training that leads to the first Microsoft certification exam within each track. High school and university adminstrators can sign up directly.

Note: Amit states that the Dreamspark software is full edition, and that "any sofware you download ... will be free for personal and non-commercial use forever." This means: "Microsoft licenses the software to you for educational use [for you as a student so] ... you can use the software without restriction for school assignments or personal projects. If you write or design something that you wish to sell, however, you need to purchase a standard licensed copy of the Microsoft software before you sell your product."


This made me curious about other deals that might be available to me as a student so I began a search. I suggest that you check out the specific package or product that you want at a number of sites and find out the exchange rate on your credit card if you're shopping from Canada like me.

• JourneyEd offers software, hardware, books and bags to post secondary students at considerable discounts. For example, Adobe Creative Suite Premium, normally priced at nearly $2000, can be purchased by college students for about $400 (469 Cdn). There's also a price for K-12 students and teachers of about $600. I checked out their Wacom link and also found several discounted tablets. Having a tablet is really useful if you want to develop instructional presentations in math and are less than adept at drawing shapes with a mouse. Products for Canadians can be seen at this link. The first page shows their highlighted items, but if you delve through the lists on the left, you may find exactly what you're looking for. There are products for both PCs and Macs. (Campus Tech seems like a college clone of JourneyEd.)

• The Adobe Website has North American shopping sites for higher education and K-12 students & teachers. Purchases can be made online or qualify for free shipping before the end of September. There is also a very nice bundle of Premier Elements 7 and Photoshop 7 for $119 US (not online). To qualify you have to go through a validation process. For countries other than the US and Canada, visit their International Store page.

• Academic Superstore has a much larger product line including many items available on the sites above. Products may be full price discounted, or just great deals such as their collection refurbished tablets. There are additional special discounts for K-12 students and parents. (Proof of enrollment will have to be furnished.) There is also a link to their parallel Canadian site, but I'm not sure if the the student discounts apply in Canada.

• Studica.com in addition to their general merchandise has 3 additional features that are quite interesting:

(a) their Studica Skills competitions (original and digital music; photo editing;
video game, fashion or graphics design, TV broadcasting)
(b) Project Lead the Way Challenge -- hands on, project and problem-based
activities for students interested in engineering, biomechanics,
aeronautics, and biomedical sciences (Parent site: PLTW)
(c) Internship Program -- these can be on site or virtual and will provide
high school or college credits

• Software4Students.ca -- this is an Adobe-only affiliated program for Canadian students in grades 6-12 or on staff in a school in a participating district. After validation of appropriate identification, you can take advantage of the great prices the offered on their Adobe products and enter to win the Vis Tablet.

[McHumor.com by T. McCracken: Software Cartoon 6821]

Finally there is the wonderful Giveaway of the Day. When you subscribe, a new giveaway lands in your inbox or feedreader each day. These are full versions from a wide range of software companies willing to give people 24 hours to download free for non-commercial use. After you click on the orange "Proceed to Download Page" button, ignore all other promotions, and scroll to just below the product description. There you'll find the comments and reviews.

I like to wait until later in the day and read what others are saying about a program before making a decision about whether it's a good one or not. Also, comments often contain links to other online freebies that do the same job and that they like better.

NOTE!!! If you do a download, you must activate it right away. Open the "Read Me" file and follow the instructions exactly to register the product. Otherwise it will turn back into a trial version pumpkin and you'll either have to purchase the product or wait and hope for it to come back again.

Podcasting -- my first try

My brother, Eric, to whom I get closer year after year and who I think is quite brilliant in his own way, says he hates to read. This is totally surprising to me because he is a deep thinker and I associate reading and deep thought. He's a great speaker and a wonderful listener, so this is a bit of an enigma. Perhaps for Eric reading just takes too much time, or it may interfere with the stream of his own consciousness. However, it may also be that he just doesn't like print.

One of the assignments in the Web 2.0 course -- now finished -- was to create a podcast. Here is my first, dedicated to Eric. Perhaps this medium will interest him more -- after all our parents were both radio broadcasters. He could record his various talks and presentations and later edit them for sharing with others through one of his new websites. Eric, if you're listening, this one was for you.


Subscribe Free Add to my Page

For a very funny take on Gladwell, I offer Kirby Ferguson's video below. Please be warned, the language and humour are a little 'off colour' and as they say on TV "may be offensive to some viewers," but I include it because I admire the quit wit and inventive thinking that goes into Kirby's work -- so enjoy or skip as you will.




Podcast creation strikes right at my personal perfectionist streak. I have a hard time saying 'enough' until I have every music beat and every bit of narration just right. My podcast was created using a free program called Audacity, and although I don't even understand what all the functions do to a sound file, I 'm confident having completed this first try, that I could get my students started in similar programs as we are not allowed to download Audacity at school. They're pretty quick at figuring out what various software programs can do and would soon show me more effective ways to handle the minimal effects I attempted. With this kind of program a little knowledge and some determination seem to go a long way.

[Note: if using Audacity, you may also need the Lame MP3 Encoder because Audacity does not export in MP3 format. Fortunately you only have to direct Audacity to this file on your computer the first time you need it. After that the process will be automatic. However, to make it work that first time, you must know where this file was installed, so make note of its location on your computer when it installs or put it on your desktop.]

So - how is podcsting a tool educators might use?

I really like this process for classroom work. Without images and video, students have to be really succinct in their explanations. They can't rely on the audience to make unspoken connections. I also think that the processes of editing and repetition that are needed to get the script just right are great ways to reinforce learning. Essay editing often stops after a couple of tries because we don't have the heart to make the kids revisit their work over and over. With podcasting one can hope that their the natural instinct to want this kind of published material to show them at their very best will take over and that the long term memory of the content will linger.

Here are some of the other suggested uses and examples created my co-students in this Wilkes course:

• creating a series of instructional podcasts to accompany class lectures; embedding or linking to them from a class or school website or wiki. This becomes a great reference for students who like to listen again to the key ideas of important classes and to help students who are absent keep up with the class (from Kate)
• Denise's podcast was in the form of a riddle to be used to help prepare a group of younger children for a field trip to the zoo; she also pointed out that this would be a good way for speech and second language teachers to get students to practise and listen to their own voices.
• students can record mock campaign speeches when doing a unit on elections (from James)
• record math raps or songs-- as Pam said "anything to get students excited about Math"
• help young children improve listening skills by giving them practice in following instructions (from Patricia)
  
• create a jingle or advertisement for a new product or an upcoming event (from Joanie) -- I can see myself using this as an a assignment in a new Science and tech program I'll be writing for our online division this fall. (Her actual podcast about a lesson that mashed up Mcdonald's, math, geography, cultural studies and Google Earth created the most controversy in the discussion forum, but I love her concept.)
  
• Tari made a "6th grade survival guide."
  
• Donna composed her own musical intro to her podcast introducing young students to an assignment on melodic composition.
• Gina and several others mentioned the benefits of being able to communicate more frequently with or post special online bulletins for parents.
  
• Breanne used her podcast to introduce a very sensitive subject for Black History Month.
• Meagan and Rod (both fellow Canadians!) mentioned the benefit of using podcasts to share ideas with other teachers; Megan looked at digital story telling and Rod discussed five of his favourite Web 2.0 tools
  

Finally here are a two podcasting websites of interest:

• EPN - The Education Podcast Newtork: "an effort to bring together into one place, the wide range of podcast programming that may be helpful to teachers looking for content to teach with and about, and to explore issues of teaching and learning in the 21st century. "

• Tech Chick Tips: "Tips and tricks for teaching 21st century students using 21st century skills from two Texas educators obsessed with anything digital!"

Reflection: 2 weeks left in Wilkes EDIM 502 (Web 2.0)

I am the sort of person who tends to react first and then think about things later -- especially when it comes to trying frustrating Web 2.0 applications for which I see no immediate personal need or use. Last week's assignment was to try image editing with a free online application called Picnik. I'm not a photography person. In fact I've been on my first vacation away from home in 20 years in eastern Canada's most beautiful areas -- Cape Breton and the Gaspe -- and neither my point-&-shoot nor my video cam have been used.

Last week's Wilkes assignment was to edit 10 images in preparation for creating an online presentation. I was rushed and the free version of Picnik strips out a lot of the more interesting functions such as cloning and layering, so I tried a few effects, wrote the week's reflection paper, and put the rest off. However, this week, feeling that I missed an opportunity to learn more about processes and applications some of my kids would probably enjoy using, I decided to start over. I switched topics so I could select new photos that would lend themselves better to editing.

Here then are the text of this weeks' reflection paper and my online presentation. [Each of the photos has been edited using Picnik. On the last slide are the links to the original images so you can do before and after comparisons and judge whether you think the hours I put into this were well spent. Most of the images are licensed under Flickr's Creative Commons Share and Share Alike License, so in that spirit I've opened my presentation to downloading for non-commercial purposes. The only requirement is that if you use it in your classroom you wave a Canadian flag (lol!)]:

This week I resolved to approach the ‘problem’ of using this software in the same way one of my best student mentors would. I am thinking particularly of a fellow named Tom. Since I’ve introduced the use of Web 2.0 tools at our school, he has created some of the most stunning work I’ve ever seen. Tom’s approach to trying new software is first playful and then thoughtful. He begins by just exploring. Because he’s just playing, during this part of the process he’s completely open-minded and in short order discovers what is new and interesting in the program. As he plays, a vision of what’s possible for the project that I will have invited him to work on begins to coalesce. At some point he’ll transition from apparently directionless fooling around and experimentation to planning and producing his final product.

I have learned from watching Tom and other students work that I have to provide time for this unstructured discovery. It’s necessary if they are going to step outside their comfort zone when they take on the task of doing an assignment or project. Playing without the pressure of deadlines and grades allows students to just goof around and get to know the software and each other (if they’re going to work as a team). If I surround them with the normal structures of instructions and expectations too soon, they tend to stick with what they already know and never get to that new place of creativity and self-learning that can turn project creation into a journey of personal growth.

When I knew that the fossil topic could not be reasonably handled with 10 images, I recalled an old ‘script’ I had previously partially developed for a piece on ethical uses of online resources but had never finished. For this topic I knew that less would lead to more. The message had to be presented in a way that was stark and memorable to my students. I could have listed all the do’s and don’ts, but I’ve tried this before and it doesn’t stick with my kids. They think that because they see everyone else treating the internet like a free store, they can download and use anything they like.

Unfortunately, my students often have to learn the hard way that this is not acceptable. One of these instances occurred when several of them developed slides for PowerPoint for Peace. When I asked those who’d used internet images to show me their sources and bibliographies, they had to admit they hadn’t followed the guidelines. In fact they felt that people who post work on the net are asking to have it stolen if they don’t make it available to everyone to use. Needless to say these wonderful pieces of work were not submitted to the website because they did not meet the project requirements, and there were several very disappointed students who felt I was being completely unreasonable.

Those 3 experiences -- feeling I’d ducked out on last week’s assignment, reflecting on Tom’s creative process as he works, and having to disappoint the kids who wanted to see their work online -- were the impetus for this piece.

This week’s work has given me a greater appreciation for the creativity involved in building on the work of others -- i.e. using it to create something new that people will respond to in a positive way. It’s also beginning to please me to think that other people may want to use it not only as is but also as a starting place for building something new of their own. I know in September my students will look at me with different eyes when they learn that I was the one who created this presentation. Doing this kind of work gives me a footing in their tech-savvy world and an opportunity to share creative moments with them. That makes offering them these kinds of activities very special to me.

I am in the fortunate position of working in an alternative, individualized education program so ways can usually be found to give our students course credits for completing Web 2.0 projects. Now that I am gaining a feeling for project-based work as well, I can build more of these experiences into my courses. Having tried them myself, I’ll be able to talk ‘artist to artist’ when I set and enforce the standards and limits within which the students must work. There is no better way to gain this kind of credibility in their eyes than to be a fellow struggler and to be able to speak from my own experiences about the power of discovering that inside the constraints lie the challenges that make success even sweeter. That’s what Tom can knows and what I am learning.

(Note: the presentation is best viewed full screen.)

Respect All Work

Dingwall, Nova Scotia & Educational Vodcasting

I am sitting at the door of a cabin in the Markland Coastal Resort looking out over Aspy Bay which is near the northern tip of Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia.

We've put in here so I can get my course work up to date before Friday. Below the cliff outside my door, the surf pounds in on the beach. Here the beach is sandy, but go a little north or south and it turns rocky. If I look to the right (south) I see the sandy spit and the cliffs over by Neil Harbour.

If I look right (north) I'll see the point of land we're going to for more whale watching in a couple of hours.

2 days ago we spotted our first ever whale(?s) from a gravel road atop a cliff on the way into a town called Meat Cove. I've lived on the west coast for over 20 years and had never seen a whale before. It was so exciting to catch sight of a water spout as the whale came up for air and then watch the arch of its back and tail as it dove under the surface. The weather is clouding over now and there may be thunder and lightning and torrents of rain later in the afternoon, but that should wait until after we get back into the harbour at Bay St. Lawrence. The tour operators have even invited Thelma, the wonder dog, along on their boat. She always travels with her own life jacket, just in case.

This trip is turning into a journey of contradictions. Some days we hunt for fossils (the oldest we'll see are over 500, 000, 000 years); on others we search for whales; and in about a week we'll be looking for another an idyllic spot with wifi service so I can get the next assignments done. What's amazing to me is that I'm perched on a bluff in the middle of 'Nowhere', Canada doing my homework which will be submitted to my university in Pennsylvania and marked by an instructor who lives in California. In Dingwall the water supply is doubtful (Thelma would not drink, and the locals say that gypsum from an old mine is leaching into the groundwater) and there's no fresh lettuce to be found in the town, but they have high speed wifi internet and cell phone service!

I wasn't asked to attend Google Academy.Oh well, it's their loss! I've registered instead for a 3 day workshop on making pod/vodcasts.

I wandered across the website of these 2 Woodland Park, Colorado, teachers some time ago and then managed to see them when I was at the CUE conference in San Jose last fall. If I were going back to classroom teaching, this is the paradigm I'd move towards. It uses technology to uniquely change what is going on in math and science classes. These guys deliver the general instructional part of their lessons via vodcast and then use class time for Q & A, guided practice, and tests. They also work on a mastery model, so students cannot move from one unit to the next until they have achieved a grade that indicates they truly understand the material.

What's unique here is that instead of telling the students what they need to know in school and then sending them home to struggle with the questions on their own, Jon Bergmann and Aaron Sams, let the kids watch and take notes on the instructional material on their own and then work through the assignments in class. Students do what they can most easily handle on their own (i.e. watch a lesson and take notes) on their own. Class time is reserved for for what gives kids the most trouble -- working with the skills and concepts. This is such a simple idea it's almost scary. How powerful would the learning be in all our high school classes if we orchestrated the learning process by giving help and guidance to individuals and small groups during class time instead just dispensing information like so many talking heads?

The fact that kids are also held to a higher level of accountability -- i.e. they do not receive credit for incomplete understanding and inconsistently applied skills -- adds to the effectiveness of this model. Going through the motions of learning -- getting something on paper that shows an assignment has been tried, doing questions but never correcting them, listening but never formulating or verbalizing answers in class -- this just isn't good enough under a mastery model. The kids now have the chance to get the help they need, but they're also required to produce high quality work. It's a win-win.

Finally there are teachers who've figured out how to make the time to really give students the instruction they need and then how to hold those students accountable for their learning. And I'm going to hear all their secrets next month from Aug. 4-6. The workshop is called 21st Century Learning that Works. I'm so glad the Google Academy people turned me down!

My new Wilkes course is called Web 2.0. Ironically I chose to do it while travelling home from NECC through rural Canada where there can be very little or no internet service. July 3rd at midnight was the deadline for applications to Google Academy and applicants were required to create a one minute video. I chose the topic ‘Motivation’ and had visions of a combination of slides and student voices interwoven in some magical way, but as time became shorter and shorter, I decided to use some footage of a young woman named Christine that had been taken as she was working on her last project in Earth Science 11.

Christine came to our school because her family had decided she needed to leave Meritt and live with her grandparents here in Surrey. She had only a few courses left to graduate and finally ended up with me for her last one. She had failed Biology 12 twice and was understandably worried about being able to finish on time. As I watched her try over and over to make sense of the text material in the ESC 11 course we’d chosen because it was easier than Biology, I began to understand just how serious her anxiety was. She almost could not look at the student booklet without having a panic attack. As the completion deadline cam nearer and nearer, she became more and more shut down and the mountain between her and graduation became bigger and more impossible to climb. Fortunately I have the freedom to come up with alternative assignments and there is a happy ending to Christine’s story. She spoke so well in the interview that I decided to trim her 11+ minutes down to the 1 required by the Google Academy people and use that for my application.

The trimming took 2 days. Adding titles and music to the video took half a day. Posting to YouTube had me tearing my hair out. I figured thousands of people do this every week so I only left about 2 hours for the task. (tick…tick…tick…). I started with an flv file (BIG MISTAKE) and watched the little upload symbol rotate for 1 of the two precious hours. After I read the directions, I tried again with an MP4 file. This time the load line zipped across the page. “Success!” I thought -- but no -- 5 mm short of the end, it stopped and flipped me the infamous ‘unknown error’ message. The video would not upload. I tried again and again. I changed to MP2. I changed the aspect ratio. I changed from regular to widescreen. Nothing worked.

With 15 minutes left I went online and found that this is a ‘well-known’ problem that can be avoided by using the ‘batch load’ feature even if you have only 1 measly 1 minute clip to put up. There is a ‘video for dummies’ posted in YouTube. Batch loading required that I download Gears. This resulted in a near fatal error -- the machine had to be shut down completely or risk final demise if I didn’t do it fast enough. I had to chose between losing all the great thoughts I had typed into the application form (which could not be saved and could not be posted without the YouTube URL) and losing my computer. I shut the it down.

As I waited for the reboot, the penny dropped. One post I read in the forum was so thoroughly written up that the person had included her browser details. She was using Firefox --- browser --- Firefox -- browser -- Firefox -- Firefox! I knew what the problem was.

Several months ago when I was trying to write assignments in Blogger using FF, my professor was not able to read them. In June, when I tried to post a Google Calendar in a Google Doc using FF, my husband was not able to see it. In both cases the fix was to move to Internet Explorer. I knew those Google Apps seemed happiest when composed or created in IE, so I decided to switch browers and give it one more try.

By now the midnight deadline had passed; however, I am staying with a friend who lives almost as far east as you can get in this country. We look out her window at the Bay of Fundy. I am in the Atlantic time zone, but my home is on the Pacific coast. I watched the video load in less than 3 minutes (not such a dummy after all, eh?), redid the application, and submitted it with a note inside saying that I was playing by Pacific (home turf) rules and hoped they would still accept my application.

I have not heard anything back, but I did learn how to post to YouTube – just use Internet Explorer and the process works fine.

Here then is my first YouTube video, entitled Christine Speaks. She’s talking about the difference having an alternate assignment -- one using an easy, easy online web page building tool called Squidoo – made in her life.

Here I am at NECC!!!

I can't believe how much my life has changed in the past 20 months -- since the day I first gulped and offered to do a PowerPoint so my teaching partner and I could promote a new idea we had for a course on our school. I had paid so little attention to 'things technological' that she had to show me what PPT was and what kids did with it and how to make it work.

In my own overly confident way after a few months of running tools down and talking about them a lot, I started sending proposals all over the place thinking that I really had something remarkable to tell people about how to use Web 2.0 tools in their own classes. And unbelievably people have been listening.

My 'tools & teaching' partner, Debra, and I have grown hugely since our first presentation a year ago in Calgary. Back then, we were so heavily scripted that we even 'bolded' in red the cues for changing the slides as we 'delivered our speeches'. We had so much to say and were so afraid we'd forget something important. Now we've relaxed into just telling our story and inviting others to share our excitement. [Note to self: Everything I'm doing is infused with the idea of story-telling now -- even doing math questions. This will definitely be a topic for a future blog.]

We have a great suite of tools to share. Debra shows how to transform a lesson and I take a more project-based approach.We're moving towards creating a PPLLG ("passionate potluck learning group") with play dates once a month after school. Even though she couldn't make this trip and I'm doing a 2-person act on my own, I have loads of wonderful ideas to share.

If you'd like to hear my story, drop by the Small Changes; BIG RETURNS poster session from 10-12 on Tuesday morning. Add me to your planner; you'll find me in booth 33 all the way down the right of the room at the back on the main floor =just after you come in the doors. Bring your curiosity and a lesson idea and let's talk. That's what it's all about for me -- bouncing ideas off each other and seeing what wonderful kinds of work we can get our kids to produce. I'll help you pick a tool that you can manage to do a old job in a new way.

Also the Wilkes people will be on the exhibit floor, so you can chat with Karena et al about the program if you want more information.

Final Project for Assessment (520)

It's week 7 and I'm working on the final project for this course. The greatest challenge for me has been to learn how to write learning targets. It's a little like the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears: what is too few? what is too many? what is going to be juuusssst right?

Image Sources: The Value Locus Decision Matrix in Leonard Cohen Search (blog) March 20, 2008

The project I've chosen is a rewrite of part of my Earth Science 11 program. Earth Science should be the science with the broadest appeal to young people because it's full of drama and action and controversy. Unfortunately, high school Earth Science courses are sometimes about as vital as a collection of rocks gathering dust on a shelf. Except for a short reference to the greenhouse effect or global warming, because this is 'science', the people are left out. It's in the human/Earth interaction that the intrigue and the most interesting stories lie.

My search for a new way to present ESC 11 began when I heard a CBC radio broadcast of an interview with Alanna Mitchell in a series about Watersheds. (Unfortunately there is no embed code for this podcast so I'll substitute a video of her talking about her book entitled Sea Sick. This "is the first book to explain how the global ocean -- 99 percent of the planet's living space -- is undergoing vast chemical changes at the hand of man and why that matters. At risk is the very structure of life in the ocean and, therefore, on the planet as a whole."[Note: To hear the interview which was fascinating, click the link and then scroll down to March 4 -- Sea Sick: The Global Ocean Crisis.]


If I could turn ESC 11 into a tale of discovery, change, and looming crisis, I could make my students begin to sit up and take a look at the landscape in which they live. In the Pacific Northwest we are surrounded by the evidence of geologic transformation. My kids ski and board on mountains carved by the action of glaciers during the last ice age (below left). They party at the beach on the northern shore of Semiahmoo Bay overlooked by our nearest volcano, Mt. Baker (below right).

[Click on on picture for full view taken December 2008.
It was assembled using PhotoScape the free alternative to Photoshop.]

They take the ferry to Vancouver Island across Georgia Strait which is being pushed closer to the mainland every day by the subduction of our own Juan de Fuca Plate -- the remnant of the once vast Farallon Plate from which the chain of volcanoes from BC down into California was built.

Image Source: Geoscape Vancouver: Earthquake!!

They live every summer under water restrictions because the winter snow pack is generally not able to supply our watershed with enough water to meet the demands of our metropolitan area. Our province is a mosaic of ecosystems that reflect a topography created by successive slamming of micro-continents into the ancient continental margin. If you drive east from our coastal temperate rainforest over the Coast Range and into the BC interior and you'll pass through a once thriving forest being devastated by pine beetles and end up in a desert.

[This collage was created using Vuvox.]

Our Arctic Ocean is being claimed by other nations greedily eyeing its ocean floor resources now that global warming is destined to open the elusive Northwest Passage, and that is where my project for this course is going to start: with an exploration of the global oceans and a look at Canada's northern continental margin.

The challenge is to figure out how to embed the science in the stories, and to grow a generation of children who feel connected to their landscape and understand the reciprocal nature of their relationship with it. My goals for this course are to excite the students' passions and to help them understand that some knowledge of science can be helpful in understanding both natural events and the human issues that are so interconnected.

“When people know how scientists go about their work and reach scientific conclusions, and what the limitations of such conclusions are, they are more likely to react thoughtfully to scientific claims and less likely to reject them out of hand or accept them uncritically. The myths and stereotypes that young people have about science are not dispelled when science teaching focuses narrowly on the laws, concepts, and theories of science. Hence, the study of science as a way of knowing needs to be made explicit in the curriculum. Once people gain a good sense of how science operates - along with a basic inventory of key science concepts as a basis for learning more later - they can follow the science adventure story as it plays out during their lifetimes” (Benchmarks Online: The Nature of Science).

Oceans 11.2

I'm compiling a Diigo list of resources for this project. It will certainly grow over the next weeks as Oceans 11 take shape. The one that most fascinates me right now is called: One Planet Many People: Atlas of Our Changing Environment. If you can believe it, this thing can be downloaded! It's incredible.

"Increasing concern as to how human activities impact the Earth has led to documentation and quantification of environmental changes taking place on land, in the water, and in the air. Through a combination of ground photographs, current and historical satellite images, and narrative based on extensive scientific evidence, this publication illustrates how humans have altered their surroundings and continue to make observable and measurable changes to the global environment." ( from their home page)

Here for example is their page on global ocean 'dead zones' followed by a case study look at the Mississippi. (Again click the picture to view the full sized image.)
I also suggest that you take a look at the book Fragile Earth for inspiration. It's a powerful compilation of juxtaposed photos that tell the story of the transition of the Earth from cool and hospitable to hot, unpredictable, and even treacherous to life as we now know it. [Note: Please turn the sound down on my video. I forgot to disable the mike when I did the screen capture! You can view the image video on the website -- but the book is even better.]

"We don't want to believe what we know."

(Yann Arthus-Bertrand in Ted Talks)